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Thanks to Roger Dooley (author of Brainfluence), I found out about Affectiva and Affdex, their tool. Affectiva is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin off founded in 2009 by Prof. Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D. and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. to commercialize emotion technology inventions developed at the MIT Media lab, as they developed the following two products:

Q Sensor – a wearable biometric sensor in use at 150 leading universities and corporations — tracks excitement, engagement, stress and anxiety.

Affdex interprets facial expressions to scientifically measure emotional responses in real-time using a standard webcam. Large companies and market research firms such as Millward Brown use Affdex to deliver intuitive emotion insights for advertisements.

Your face says it all. According to Affectiva, the face expressions paint a rich canvas of emotional response, and emotions drive brand loyalty, influence purchase decisions and directly impact attention, perception, memory, human behavior and decision making. Measuring and quantifying emotions is tricky business. Conventional methods, like web surveys, have scale and reach but require time, effort and self-awareness from respondents. New methods, such as lab-based neuromarketing techniques offer intricate scientific insights but are often costly, complicated and limited in scale. Affdex’s facial expression technology delivers the sophisticated insight of neuroscience with the scale and low cost of web surveys.

Affdex unleashes the power of cloud computing coupled with a simple webcam to easily and cost-effectively reach more people, in more places. This is a breakthrough technology that delivers real-time emotional insights into spontaneous reactions. Affdex scientifically measures emotional response using patented facial expression algorithms: unobtrusively, cost effectively and at scale with no special equipment and no extra process. Affdex tracks facial and head gestures in real-time using key points on the viewer’s face to recognize a rich array of emotional and cognitive states, such as enjoyment, attention and confusion. Individual emotional responses are then aggregated, analyzed and presented in an interactive dashboard that provides moment-by-moment analysis of the emotional track with dynamic segmentation by emotion metric and survey responses.

I tried this great tool on the new Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial (The Dog Strikes Back) and the results show that I enjoyed seeing the dog shaking after he came out of the water, and I disliked the “intergalactic superstar”. Affdex is great for both market research and clinical research. It captures the Smile, Surprise, Confusion/Dislike or Attention using machine learning on analyzing your face. This online tool allows you to compare your reactions to all the other people (an average) that have tested it. In order to use the tool, you must have a webcam. So give it a try (click here) and share your video link.

My own reactions to the Volkswagen Super Bowl 2012 commercial

In the following video you can see how Dr. Rosalind Picard demonstrates the two technologies invented at MIT that Affectiva is developing into products.

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[…] The expression reading technology is provided by MIT spin-off Affectiva (read about this tool here, you can also test it). The Neuromarketing Awards winners were chosen on factors such as where in […]